Why Deadpool is the Internet's favorite superhero

The forthcoming movie starring the Marvel Comics antihero is quite unlike any other superhero film we've seen so far, an R-rated action-comedy with a self-deprecating, fourth-wall breaking sense of humor that's evident right from the very first official video released for the movie: A trailer for its trailer.

If you aren't familiar with Deadpool from the comics, this is exactly the sort of thing he's known for — self aware jabs at the conventions of the genre he appears in. It's one of the things Deadpool fans love about him. The trailer plays directly into this — on the movie's official Facebook page, the post accompanying the trailer reads:

That's the sort of meme-y glibness the Internet just loves. In fact, Deadpool might be the perfect superhero for Internet fandom.

"He really is the Internet's. He came of age along with the Internet," current "Deadpool" comic writer Gerry Duggan tells Tech Insider. "There is something to that — there are people who only know him from Tumblr ... there was a newness to Deadpool, and he wasn't that hard to sort of go back and reread everything that had been done because as much of it as there was, you're not talking about a legacy character like Spider-Man or Captain America that goes back decades and decades. He was a bit easier to mine."

Deadpool is unique among superheroes in that he has — by no real effort on the part of his creators or Marvel — grown to become the comic book personification of internet memes.

"It's definitely a double-edged sword," says Duggan. "I think there are people that dismiss Deadpool stories out of hand, because maybe they have seen stuff online that someone makes that we didn't make, and they think 'Oh that's just crude and crass.' And that's not really our bag, we're really trying to write humor. It may or may not be crude, but Deadpool is a character that's out there just selling himself now. Whether it's in cosplay, or fanfic — even if it's just taking pages out of context — they sort of live online."